 So right is on his way. Let's start the meeting at 6.31. Yeah, and before we dive in, I just want to, on behalf of the board, acknowledge everyone who acted so professionally and wonderfully with the scare we had last week. You know, obviously it's fortunate no one was hurt. And unfortunate that someone felt the need to scare the whole community in that manner. But yeah, with all these things, there's oftentimes a silver lining, and I think the silver lining was how well everyone was prepared, how well everyone acted, just how, you know, adeptly and professionally the response was, how quick it was. I especially want to thank, you know, Chief Eric Nordensen of the Montpere Police Department for orchestrating such a great team. All of the officers there have been in particular. Officers, Diane Matthews and Mike Philbrook, who were the first to respond, rushed into what at the time could have been a very dangerous situation, you know, with nothing on their minds but securing the safety of our kids. All of the, you know, other police officers who responded, including those from neighboring communities, my understanding is there were officers from Barrie and other communities who came to help. All the other first responders, you know, the helicopter was flown into Berlin to be ready. You know, the other areas were secured to make sure that if there was a situation we were prepared for it to Principal Jason Gingold, and of course to Libby for really orchestrating, you know, the staff response on such a professional level for coordinating with the police, with the teachers, with everyone, all of the teachers, students and staff, you know, the training that they went through was evident, you know, and the way they held it so, you know, adorably and with a plum in a very, very stressful situation. You know, and to the community, I think the community really communicated well and, you know, information obviously was passed as quickly as it could, but, you know, people I think were very understanding of the strain and stress that everyone was under and everyone acted wonderfully. So hopefully we never have to go through such a scare again, but, you know, thank you to everyone who made the situation as good as really could be expected and better given what happened. So I just wanted to acknowledge that on behalf of the board and again thank everyone in the community. Now we can turn to public comment, and I don't know if anyone else on the board wants to add to that. Yeah, I would just second the gratitude for the staff. My kiddo was here, I was in a building, I worked a couple doors down, so, and I know that there was a very real sense of danger, and I've heard nothing but fantastic things about how the staff managed it and how you did Jason, and that the message and the support that was given to parents and how to talk to our kids about that was also really valuable and timely. Having folks who work with students this age know how to provide age-appropriate direction about combination of giving space, but a sense of safety was really helpful, and I really, I'm sorry I haven't reached out to say so, but just thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Yeah, no, again, thank you, and also, you know, the support of, you know, support for students and staff that were shaken by the event and needed some, you know, to help work through it, you know, and to reach out to Washington County Mental Health and other support was also appreciated and needed, and again shows that, you know, the care and compassion that everyone had. So public comment, I see a few people on the phone and in the audience, start with the audience. Is anyone in the audience want to make comment? I see one person. Please come up to the front desk and introduce yourself for the record and some people watching. Thank you very much for this evening. My name is Tim Sinnet. I have two boys who are in UES, Driscoll's in fourth grade and Bailey's in second grade. My partner Hannah Reed and I have long been huge supporters of public schools and of the teachers who dedicate so much of themselves to the education of our children. At the moment we are feeling frustrated by the lack of academic standards at UES and we're particularly discouraged by the literacy data that is reflected in the experiences of our own two students. Despite their different learning styles, both of our sons have struggled to learn to read at UES which has been challenging and stressful for our family. We are now investing in a private tutor to help both of our children establish for the first time the strong foundation in phonics from which all reading skills stem and recent conversations with a number of MRPS families have revealed that we are not alone in this struggle. The information put forth in tonight's ABC data report is further confirmation and I look forward to hearing how the board and administration plan to address this critical gap in our school's academic platform. Great. Thank you. This is on the agenda. Awesome. Fantastic. Great. Anyone else in the room? Otherwise it looks like we have Amanda on screen. If anyone else is on screen, yeah please raise your hand and my understanding is that I've actually saw this happen today is that Zoom has a new function that if you raise your hand physically it will pick that up and actually put the raise hand function in the corner. If your camera is on, yes. Yes. And again, please introduce yourself for the record in the audience. Sure. Hi. My name is Amanda Garces. That is for the record and I am a parent of two kids at UES. One is in first grade and one is in fourth grade. Today I would like to thank every teacher, food service worker, instructional assistant, janitors and every staff of this district for the dedication to our kids. Today is probably the last time, at least this year, that I will come to this board to beg you and leave you to engage with families to really see us as experts of our children and our community. We can do so much better together but we get short change because of control and lack of empathy and the board's failure to engage with families meaningfully creating an atmosphere of teachers versus caregivers. The school board data report does depict clearly the challenges that districts have. We are doing great for our kids like my daughter but filling a high percentage of others and I hope you as a board ask questions and understand that you do have a responsibility to this community. Data should not be seen as a hammer but as a flashlight. I learned that in a training that I hope you take one day. The flashlight that is showing that you have been hearing from some of us that is not a myth. I'm not going to repeat some of the questions we have brought here before around the use of the STARS assessment data around the flaws of the fountains and PINEL assessments and the danger to only looking at some of those measures today. What I hope is that you engage with families and learn about what we're asking the district to do. At least have some heart to say that you're looking into the national conversation and are engaging with educators and families to meaningfully and accommodate and find a common ground about how we're going to change that disparity that we see in reading. I hope that this data shows for you is that our kids have flaws but that we need to do a better system to serve them. That we use an asset-based system that is really looking at our kids with their strengths and the love that they have. I hope that we can talk about today that literacy is not a special education problem alone but that students with disabilities are also struggling and we need to ask why. We have a special education system that fails teachers and students at the same time and a lack of transparency of how we're doing. We're blaming parents for an increase of special education evaluation requests and are not transparent about the amount of administrative complaints we are receiving. It is not enough to have a Black Lives Matter flag if we're not taking seriously our students and families concerns. We have a national conversation about literacy that points out how the assessments we use do not give us accurate insights but we choose to continue to fund those. My tone here is not an attack but a call to action because this is the community that I continue to choose to live in despite of the law. As I see parents in other school districts fighting against equity, I am amazed of the pushback that I received today. Not today but always when I ask questions about our most vulnerable students. I'm here today because I would love to make a call out to the whole community that we need to do better and that we need to speak up. This is why I will not come back again but I hope that other parents really do come and share with you if you're not willing to engage with us. So for last since it's my last login I would love for you to consider really thinking about our BIPOC students and the support that they receive from the BIPOC community connections coordinator who only gets funded like eight hours. She works for for the high school and some for the middle school. The students are really loving it. We which is a black woman and why we're not funding her full-time position it's we should be asking that since we are trying to attract BIPOC educators. I hope that we created council district that is diverse funded and respected by the administrators and let's value our teachers and give them what they need. So when now that you're negotiating their contracts and I hope that we value them as you value your administrators. And so I just want to again for you to remember the safety committee recommendations and really look at what we're filling around the safety for students. Thank you very much. Thank you Amanda. I do not see any other hands. Is that all? Again thank you for weighing in and after consent agenda we are going to have a more detailed discussion on literacy and performance in general. Next is the consent agenda. Do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda? I move to approve the consent agenda. Do I have a second? I second. Any discussion or questions? I had a question. Yes. The March 8th meeting mentioned that we're going to be discussing board priorities and indicators for success so are we going to be defining those indicators for success at that meeting? I was just wondering if there's a plan based on the last meeting. I think we're going to build off of what we did on the last meeting. Okay. Yeah. So I think we will definitely be discussing those indicators or whether they make sense. Now that we've had some time to sit with them. Okay. Great. Any other questions or discussions? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Great. And do you want to acknowledge that we now have A20 through A24 effectively enacted? We did it. We did it. I didn't know it was going to happen. Go team. Thanks to Emma and Emma especially for all the great work on that. So turn it over to I know Olivia you are far away but with us virtually. So turn it over to Olivia and her team for winter data presentation and I do before we start on this just want to thank you. I remember when we started on the board a data presentation of this depth and detail and really information was something of our wildest dreams. So we really appreciate the work put into it and are very much looking forward to hearing the presentation and having a robust discussion around it. Excuse me. Thank you, Jim. I think in the room is Nick Connor our community liaison who I'm not sure has been to the board before. So I'm sure Nick is waving at you and smiling. Mike Berry our director of curriculum and technology, Peggy Sue Venonstrand who's our director of student services and Jess Murray actually had a death in her family so she couldn't come tonight so Mike Jess or Mike Peggy Sue and Nick will be pinch hitting for Jess Murray tonight and if there is a question that we can't answer then we will take it back to Jess and make sure we have an answer but I bet we can answer most questions that have to do with Jess's work because we will work very closely together and I will share my screen a second. Oops that's not it. Hold on one second and then I think Peggy Sue is up first. Peggy, are you ready to go? And the way we did this before Peggy Sue starts talking. The board got the very large packet of the ABC data. The presentation today is not necessarily repetitive of that data although there may be some similar data inside of it. It's in addition to. Thanks Sue. I'll start talking now. No it's okay. There's some technical. There we go. Okay. Yeah so like Libby said what I only have a few slides here and then I have some other information that I can share based on questions we got a week ago. We got a bunch of questions in the last 24 hours so those are definitely not in the slide deck and some of them certainly we can try to answer but there might be some that we're going to require a little more time before we do that but if you go to the next slide Libby one of the questions that was brought to me was asking about our child count and what that trend looks like so child count is a point in time December 1st every year we have to send to the agency of education the number of students on that date we have in the district that are eligible for an IEP so I was able to look back for the last six years and just show what that looks like so you can see we had a high we kind of went down a little and we're kind of headed back up a bit although then this is I mean there's not a great difference right the highest here was 150 in 2017 and it looks like 2019 was the lowest at 124 so that was just one of the data points that folks were asking about so I wanted to share that with you next one Libby there were some questions around what our initial special ed evaluations look like and so I was able to dig into some there's not a place where this information is just sitting so just be clear I went through file folders and that kind of stuff to try to get that information so the light blue information here is the number of initial evaluations for special education eligibility that was done in those school years the dark blue is out of that light blue number those are the number that were eligible so when there's a gap there the rest were not eligible for special education and then there was a question that was around specifically around whoops oh wait I'm changing my screen that's not changing sorry specifically about referrals or the denial of special education evaluations those numbers are pretty low and not ones that I could share systematically but what I could find and again it was a lot of digging to find this was in the last two years if you look at the orange those are situations where there was a consideration of an evaluation but one wasn't completed not necessarily because the district refused sometimes it was the school wanted to do it in a parent refuse there were also times where parents reached out to the school and then through conversations and kind of understanding the different types of plans so EST plans section 504 plans IEPs that a team agreed that actually special education wasn't the thing that made sense for students and so an evaluation wasn't done in most of those cases it's because the student was performing near or on grade level or above and so if you are proficient in performing a grade level by default then you would not be eligible for special ed services because you don't need special excuse me specialized instruction so that's what that orange number is so hopefully that answered that question if we go down to the next one Libby there was a question around how do we know how students are doing on IEPs and this is as a large number and this is a really tricky thing that Mike and I actually have been trying to think about since we since I started and we haven't gotten a really great answer yet but I wanted to try to provide something to show you and so to start with the reason that we don't have a really great answer is because by virtue of what they are their individualized education plans right so there isn't a measurement that would be across every IEP for us to find IEPs are also written throughout the year there's not like a date necessarily when all IEPs get reviewed so there's not like a way to look and say like on January 10th how many IEP goals were matter something like that so what I asked one of the assistants in my department to do and it took her four days to do this so I felt really bad so this is not something we're going to work on a hopefully a better system but what I asked her to do is look at the January objectives so the way the IEP goals are written they have quarterly objectives that lead up to an annual goal that we is what the team is looking for the child to get to within a year so I asked her to look at the January objectives for she looked at 1200 IEP goals and objectives for grades K through five and look at what the code was around the progress for them so if you look at the bottom here where it says achieved sufficient progress emerging progress or not yet introduced those are the codes within IEPs that talk about where an individual student is on each individual objective so achieved that obviously they've achieved that as it's written sufficient progress is they are making progress and it is likely that they will reach their annual goal emerging progress is that they are not quite where we want them to be but they're still working towards the progress the goal and making progress and then not yet introduced is it hasn't been introduced yet generally that's because the student is still working on a previous objective that there's been some reason that the special educator has felt like they couldn't move to that objective yet so these are those in those 1200 objectives the percentages of those different ratings it literally took her four days I'm not sure that this really impacts or changes much about what we do because it doesn't everything so individualized but I did want to at least try to answer that in a way for now so are there any questions about those does that make sense and then Libby if you want to go down one more so some of the things that I and this is some of the things that I've been trying to think about around our system how are we making all our classes and experiences accessible for all students how can we make the experiences for students and their families more consistent across the district one of the things that I have found is that there's often a difference not only between schools but also between case managers around practices and the experiences for families and it seems like what has happened in some cases is that difference then leads to mistrust because a family has experienced something and then they experience something different and so then it feels like someone's not doing their job the right way which isn't necessarily the case it's just people of different practices so really trying to look at what are the practices that we can align so that families have a clearer understanding of what to expect and don't feel like there's somebody not doing what they're supposed to do and then another thing that I've been thinking about a lot is how are we able to maximize our capacity to meet student and family needs while also supporting our special education faculty so we don't experience burnout so we are currently down three special educators this year so our special educators are stepping up and doing great work and there's a lot of intensity for some of them that I think is causing them unnecessary stress and an already really stressful job and so part of what I am trying to think about is what are things I can do to help make sure that they are feeling supported that they are you know being recognized for the hard work that they're doing and that they don't decide to go somewhere else because quite frankly there's a lot of special ed jobs opening throughout the state and we have really good special educators and I want to keep them so part of the work that I've been doing is really trying to look at our system what are things we can do to look at caseloads some of the way that things are right now where they're very much grade based as far as who case manages what really limits the ability to flex caseloads to make sure that people are feeling like they have a caseload that feels equitable with others and you know depending on the intensity of student needs or the amount of services they might not feel as equitable and they may be overwhelming so the special educators have been great about kind of stepping up and supporting each other and taking on stuff to try to do that but it would be nice to look at systems to support that other things not on the slide that people asked there was a question about the pre-k numbers and if our number this year is higher or significantly higher than in other years so I was able to quickly look at the child count numbers around that so in 2019 we had 14 students on IEPs in preschool 2020 it was 15 2021 the 17 and we're at 19 currently so there is an upward trend many of those are speech related to articulation so there are very different eligibility standards for children from three to five then six to 21 and so a lot of those that happen at that young age don't necessarily translate into what will happen when they get into the school age and what was the other thing oh there was a question about administrative complaints that number the only ones I know about are the ones that were either in place or have come forward this year and that number is not that large but I can say is that 50% of the ones that I have dealt with this year there were no violations found and then there were 50% that required corrective action and in those cases they were all procedural so it was around deadlines and those kind of things we some of those I got like literally my first week here and so there was a lot of training that we did in the fall with special educators or I did in the fall with special educators around some of those requirements to try to make sure that those compliance pieces were in place and I think yeah what questions do people have? Questions for Peggy soon? Sure. Thank you. Yeah. A lot of so my questions stem from the fact that I'm very new to the world of special education so it it would be helpful for me to understand what we should be looking at system-wide as metrics of success because it seems to me like maybe it's not necessarily children leaving their IEP plans behind because perhaps students will need some IEP supports their entire academic career but that's what's helping them thrive but maybe that's not the case maybe we do actually want to have them not I would say the ultimate goal of an IEP is to get a student to a place that they don't need one so if you require an IEP that means that you need specialized instruction that's not available in our general system of support or that is so different from what is happening in your grade level curriculum that you need something specialized so our goal is in special education to close that gap so between so here's where your grade level peers are and there's some skill that you have that we need to do something specialized to close that gap so the goal would be close that gap and then it doesn't mean the student's disability goes away and there might still be accommodations they need to access their grade level curriculum and then we would be looking at a section 504 plan so that is all about accommodations to level that playing field and make sure that students can access their grade level curriculum so that would be a metric that we would want to look at the metric would be kids that if kids exited out of special education okay so that would be something for the that that's a metric of success yes what is what on a on the system on a system-wide scale what's something for the board to be paying attention to because I don't think we want necessarily our child counts to go down because that might mean that we're not bringing kids on to I I don't know again like I said very new to this yeah I think that it's it is challenging to look at system success because they're so by virtue of what they are right their individual education plans one of the things that I think would be great to look at as a system which kind of melds a little into what Jess was going to cover but is that we are building a capacity that we're able to meet students needs without them having to leave their public school so I think that that to me is something that is really important I know that's important for Jess I know we've all been talking about that like how do we build the capacity of our staff and our buildings and our programming so that we that our solution isn't that we need to find somewhere else for kids to go mm-hmm we're not there yet but that is certainly to me that would be success right so being able to help close the gap for children between what they're where they are skills are and where the grade level peers are that's one that's the one that we're trying to figure out how to measure on a system-wide way without requiring someone to spend four days going individually through goals right right so we're still trying to figure out you know what are the things and I think that the panorama that was called next year might offer us some different opportunities to look at data and try to figure that out because things like state testing of course they're going to be below grade level because otherwise they wouldn't be on IEP so there's no way even if students are making growth you're not going to necessarily see that when we look at a big scale picture of students with disabilities on state testing because again if they didn't have that gap they wouldn't need an IEP right does that make sense yeah so it's it is something that we're still trying to figure out what is a way that we can do that there are certainly systems that individual teams can do to look at an individual's progress over time and look at the effectiveness of their IEP and that kind of stuff but yeah it's a good still working on that okay yeah I have one one more question which is oh sure you mentioned building capacity and then one of the ways to to know we are building capacity are for board to understand that is to make sure that kids are not leaving do we track that how many kids are leaving because we couldn't provide them the IEP so we have so we have um yes so we yes I could yes tell you the number I don't have that much that's okay yeah so IEP teams make a decision around what a a child's programming needs to look like and then if the school isn't able to provide that programming then we have to look um you know at um what are what are the where are their programs that can do that mostly right now I would say that the well almost entirely I would say right now the children who are students who are placed out of district are around mental health social emotional behavioral challenges and that's certainly a trend across the state and probably across the country and the other thing is those programs have huge waiting lists so even when we have kids that really need that because they have a high level of need they can't you know they can't get there so um the more we can do to provide those supports within our schools then we're not they're not waiting okay this is a quick follow up to that um because I mean for students who might have you know very intensities are very specialized needs that require you know a place that might have like a much broader system than than we could build out um you know how often is that and how often is yeah is and is you know are the I mean obviously we want every kid to have their needs met but um for certain kids are those you know systems that we could like realistic providers and the type of thing where you know they need to be in a more specialized program and it is the you know solution trying to make sure the access to those programs is easier because it's it's not something that the district could really there are certainly kids who need a higher level than we are going to be able to provide in public school for sure um I think that there's a middle that we could add you know that we could probably find yeah so there's so not to say that there aren't some students that are going to need more than we can provide it in public school for sure um for a number of reasons but I think that there's a there's got to be more between the classroom and then you know yeah so we just need to build our continuum more that's fine um what are um the classroom teachers how do they know what their role in this is one of the things I think is really great about our special ed program is that kids are learning along with their peers rather than in a different kind of process yeah um and if that rests on some good collaboration I would imagine between the classroom teacher and the special educator or team the rest of the team and so how do classroom teachers know what they need to be doing to help those kids bridge that gap so in for individual students they all have case managers assigned to them that work with and meet with classroom teachers on a regular basis to look at what are the accommodations that a student has in a plan and look at what is like what are the lesson plans for this week or what's the unit for this week and then the special educator works with the classroom teacher to adapt that lesson and modify that lesson so it becomes accessible for all students so there's a lot of collaboration there um at the beginning of the school year I did go around to all the staff meetings doing just more like here's your legal obligation as a classroom teacher kind of thing like a one-pager like just to make sure that you all know that this isn't just something that you get to you know decide if you want to do or not kind of conversation and people were great I mean it was I don't think most people wanted would do that but I think it's just important to recognize that you know these are legal mandates that we have so um the much of the classroom teacher support right now is coming from that special ed team that works with the teacher so um that we have occupational therapists that might meet with classroom teachers to talk about how fine motor skills can be accommodated in the classroom and SLPs might be meeting with the teacher it really depends on what the individual students goals are and what they need for access but there it really is around a collaborative team sure other questions Kristen thank you so much for this report it is quite robust and it's really nice to be able to dig into just for like some baseline foundation building can you like just walk us through how an IEP referral works and then therefore how a student goes about accessing those services sure so there are a few different ways that a referral for a special ed a valve can occur in order for a student to be eligible for special education you have to have a disability there are three gates currently they're changing in July because you know we don't want to keep anything consistent so right now you have to have a disability that's gate one so there are a number of different disability categories in the Vermont special ed rules that we teams have to look at to decide if a student has one of those disabilities if they have a disability the second part of that the second gate is there has to be an adverse effect on educational performance because of that disability so that disability needs to be causing them to have issues in some kind of education in a basic skill area currently the law says that they have to be in the 15th percentile the lowest 15th percentile compared to their same grade peers in at least one basic skill area and you have to be able to show that with three different kinds of evidence and so there are six types of evidence that a team can look at and you have to be able to find at least three of those that indicate that the student is in the lowest 15 percentile in one basic skill area so if you have a disability that is adversely impacting educational performance and then a team has to look at the third gate is is there a need for specialized instruction that is not available to all students within the regular programming of school so if you have all three of those then you are become eligible and then you would write an IEP referrals can happen a couple of ways parents can request a special ed education evaluation a teacher could have a concern that there's a disability and request that that and then there's educational support team process which I'll let my talk about later because it's changed this year and is I think a little different in every school but basically it's a team that's working with a student and they're not seeing the progress that they would expect based on the interventions that they're providing and so therefore that team then recommends that an evaluation is done the key is there has to be a suspicion of a disability so it can't a student not doing well doesn't necessarily translate to there's a disability so we have to look at make sure there aren't other factors in play that could be contributed to them not doing well such as chronic absenteeism so lack of instruction those kind of things so as we're making a decision about whether or not an evaluation makes sense we would be looking at are there factors that would be contributing that aren't disability related and then are we seeing a student's performance be significantly below where their grade level peers are where we would expect them to be so thank you that was like an abbreviated master class thank you and just give a little kind of guidance conversation we have a lot of data to get through on a variety of topics um and one thing I might recommend is I think we go on a deeper dive on this is maybe like a special ed 101 as another presentation because I know sure we have a lot of questions about how it works but we try to keep questions kind of focused on on the data we're seeing otherwise I think we could spend all night talking to Peggy Sue and find ourselves at mine um Emma so yeah one of the thank you again I'll just sort of like echo whatever and and thank you for working in special education and thank you for working for us um I would be interested to know like the actual number of complaints eventually it doesn't have to happen tonight and then how that those number of administrative complaints have compared to previous years would be of interest so I looked for previous years and I can't tell I can't find them I I don't know how I would how they were documented um yeah um I can tell you this year there have been five that's have all mostly stemmed from last year but there have been five that I've dealt with since I got here and that sort of leads into my second question which is that I know that there's you know a special educator shortage in the state of Vermont and that probably extends nationwide and we're sort of in this like um almost a crisis mode in special education and I'm just wondering you know one of the roles that we have as a board is to set policy and then ensure that the district follows the policy and I was wondering if you could speak to your experience in what you and the district the areas of struggle when it comes to meeting and fulfilling the policy in the law because of the shortage you're saying I just in recognizing that is why is it such a hard job is that what you're saying no I'm wondering like have you has anything bubbled to the surface for you yeah in this district okay that has highlighted a struggle for you and the district to follow our policies and the law has anything sort of risen to the surface no um so I think what I can say generally in thinking around the administrative complaints specifically is that in those cases it was always positive intention of the people that were working and it was never about the children or them not getting services it was about trying to accommodate and collaborate with families and so there were times where a deadline got missed that got missed because in the name of collaboration and so then it kind of came back to bite people so I would say that the case management part at times gets very intensive when there is a high expectation and I and I I'm trying to say this carefully because I think families absolutely have a right to have all the information about their students so in no way am I saying that they shouldn't and case management should be the smallest part of what a special educator does so if they have to spend much of their time doing paperwork and answering emails that takes away from their opportunity to focus on the students and there is um a lot of email that comes to all of us that really um I think can get better as people feel better and feel more trusting about what we're doing so I think that what so what I think I don't think it's about policy I think that what I have experienced is it feels like there's a high level of distrust that then people are feeling like they need to constantly be making sure people are doing what they should be doing and what I see is people doing what they should be doing so I just need to help bridge that gap I don't know if I said that well but thank you okay um there was one question I just wanted about the um multilingual language learner numbers and why there were some students that didn't get services and I just wanted to quickly acknowledge that because it was a question so some students there's a test you take annually and if you get a certain point then you no longer are eligible for those services but once that happens there's usually a monitoring time where you continue to be monitored to make sure that without those services your performance doesn't drop and there are also some families that just require translation for parents but don't the students don't necessarily need those services so that's why there's that discrepancy in that number and I'll stop talking no thank you thank you very much yeah I really appreciate it and and uh me and I will work with you to try to bring you back for a deeper dive into in this bed because I know there's a lot of a lot there that I think we can find um next I don't know if you want to direct it next or oh so this is Jess's stuff so I think that the information that you put in here is what was in the data reform is that true Mike do you think yeah this is a summary of that and I think but first I just share that Jess is doing an amazing job it's unfortunate she can be here tonight because I think it would help showcase a lot of the hard work that all of the SEL folks are putting in um is she what she provides here is kind of a summary of who's accessing how many students are accessing um SEL services in the different schools and the services look quite different depending on developmental levels of the students and their needs everything's individualized one of the things that we're working on across our domains is how to track progress and in SEL land she's trying to figure out how do we track progress of those students so that they can come in and out of that support as needed and into regular education situations or with the support that they need she's also working on hiring there are two I think two positions open right now that we're trying to fill and um we're honing in on some capacity building training for next year around collaborative problem solving which is a pretty big deal in the SEL world and that'll be like a two-year commitment to that work um so we're pretty excited about that to build the capacity of our SEL staff to be able to work towards what Peggy Sue is talking about um being able to support students needs in-house um with more capacity I think that's that's what she would want to share with this slide this um talking a little bit about hazing harassment and bullying investigations these are just the general numbers um what she has shared recently is that the the pace of the investigations has lessened as the year has gone on this year um one of the things that I think also speaks to this is that we've gotten better at this work um the state has gotten better at supporting us in this work and understanding what we need to do so our investigations are happening and thorough and are hitting all the targets that they need to hit this one I'm not too sure about okay Jess would do a much better job sharing what this one is um but I think what this is is an average number of referrals per school day per month um I think and what referrals means referrals are equivalent to incidents so a referral could be um a low level behavior and a high level behavior so it's just a total number of incidents represented here uh some data about suspensions um she walks through the reasons for suspensions this year were physical aggression substance abuse um abuse of swearing language hhp violations and threats uh the trends she points out or that the number of suspensions each month has decreased over the year there was a slight increase in January um and that she's really pushing in and her folks are really pushing in with restorative practices from each of those events and it looks a little bit different depending on the event and students and the needs but that's been a primary focus for her and her crew and that's Jess's piece um unfortunately well um we're on it's unfortunate just as a family a family death um it's also unfortunate she can't be here to answer questions um any questions you think Mike could answer otherwise um I'm sure Jess will be back to do a deeper dive just make a note yes one data point that stood out to me yeah go for it was the hhp numbers and that in the 2022 2023 this school year so far and it's and it's about half over is already above the other two years that were presented and so I just would love to hear like sort of her take on are we doing you know I'm guessing that number could potentially double you know and and what does that mean in terms of like is it because she's here and she's implemented new processes or you know just would love to hear her speak to that I can I can say what my assumptions are on that and Mike thanks I couldn't find my unmute button fast enough so thanks for doing just the slides so I um I would have an assumption Emma on a couple different things one I think just Jess's position in and of itself helps because we're we have an administrative position who can focus solely on the SEL world and quite honestly while it wasn't designed to be so in the beginning of the year hhp was where she lived um in title nine so the first the first half of the year has been a huge one incurred for Jess but she's also gotten her systems in place for that um I think a second thing is is that we have new principles as well who have come in um and particularly at MS MS Julie Conrad is a middle school principal and has a really good understanding around hhp um and so there's a there's a different leadership there that's saying no we're going to start an investigation sooner um I think another piece is that kids are still learning right that we're never going to eliminate hhp investigations because a lot of it has to do with learning how to be together and as we've said to the board many many times there is a significant loss of community and how we treat each other due to the pandemic that is obvious um and I think finally um we got a lot of feedback about that we weren't we weren't doing what we were supposed to do in this hhp world and investigations and we take that feedback very seriously so there may be a reaction to um what what leaders perceived the community wanted was that they wanted to see more more not suspension sorry more hhp investigations taking place um so and just because the investigation is there those are the numbers of investigations those are not the numbers of substantiated or unsubstantiated claims or policy violations so that's just something to keep in mind that that number while may be big that's not a subs it's not a number that represents substantiated cases of policy violations it's a number that represents the number of investigations I assume like a nick is that a fair yep yep and did I mean particularly maybe not so much last year but a couple years before I mean we've been in a COVID situation over the last few years where we've been kind of keeping kids apart and yeah not mixing different groups as much do you think that has something to do the two and just in terms of keeping down the number of of interaction between kids 100 percent the kids kids two years ago were never independent they were always with an adult there was never any time when they were not with an adult um and they were never any time where they were they were together in that way so you know recess is definitely a place where hhp happened hhp claims happened more right so now we have we have kids who have more independence and freedom and with that independence and freedom they need to learn how to how to use that respectfully and in a way that we want all our kids treating each other and that's a learning curve for kids absolutely and Libby I'm guessing that there may not be data prior to the three years that you presented of you know hhp we wouldn't have data of the amount of investigations that were conducted the aoe has data I'm not sure how far it goes back like might not because he's my data was but how far we have we would have data on how many substantiated investigations we'd have because that's collected by the agency of education but not the number of investigations that occurred does that make sense yes any other further questions from like Brett a couple slides ago just did tease out that there's just some disproportionate data like the percentage of kids that we have uh that qualify for um frl or seeing like more behavior incidents for that particular group or there were some specifics um you know at ues it was 15 qualified for an ip but 27 percent of the behavior incidents are attributable to that group um so we saw a few different um instances of that and I'm just wondering how you all are thinking about that disproportionality or you know now that you have this data you how are you handling it you know is it resulting in any changes in programming or um staff professional development but essentially that data now seems like it's in hand what happens what happens with it so Michael alluded to pace you might be able to speak to the students with special needs but um the mic alluded to the fact that we are now partnering with the with mess general around their think kids programming and is a collaborative problem solving um that's based on the theory that if kids knew how to they would and so we need to teach the skills that kids might be lacking so that is incredibly intensive training I've done pieces of it before in a different district and involves coaching of our sel teams and involves a whole lot of very intensive learning for our sel teams that will start this summer so we are we are reacting to how we work with kids when certain behavior skills may be lacking let me talk about students with disabilities um so I would need to look more specifically at this data to see um but my assumptions are that um the students with disabilities that are represented here are likely students who part of their adverse effect and the impact of their disability is that they um struggle with um dysregulation that they struggle with social skills um and the things that likely would cause a behavioral referral and so that's likely most of those cases um something that's being addressed through their IEP as well but that's just a guess without seeing specifically who the students are and just to be clear how you see that add on to that just because a child is on an IEP does not mean that they are immune to the to the school board's policy correct around the HB correct um christin newt ahead of red have his end up oh there's a little note in the behavioral incidence section UES tracks majors only what constitutes a major behavioral incident what are the levels of incidents and maybe kind of examples um and then what what why does one school only track that level of incident maybe sort of rat those are really good questions and I want to make sure you have the right answer so I'm going to hold that for just if it's okay with you okay so now back to me yes oh um I was good I mean other than just that disproportionality piece I'm just thinking about like you know are are you all thinking like you know what are best practices considered and how you sort of solve for those things I mean I would imagine this is the things that you all talk about when you have your team meetings when you're seeing you know these um you know these track demographics are showing up more on these behavior incidents and just how are you all working together and and are there known best practices and how to solve for those disproportionate pieces of data and I think you you know got to that a little bit maybe it's something you're working on maybe it's something we're going to hear about in the future but I think as this board is starting to identify these um you know priorities and focus areas around um you know the achievement gap and opportunity gap I'm wondering how you all are you know plan to attend to those disproportionate pieces of data yeah I I'd save that for a longer answer from Jess great from a more detailed and longer answer from Jess because she works very closely with all of our SEL slash resiliency teams yeah so she she'd be the best person to answer that question okay thanks I'm just had a question about trend um in general about suspension uh suspensions but specifically HHB do we I'm assuming you can't report on the exact numbers but but can you report on the general trend over the years do we do we collect that I mean sounds like we may have access to that data right over the years I have some data around that that I collected when the um that's when the safety committee was working particularly for the high school um I don't believe that I collected that data around Main Street um in particular so I I could give you some but not all and I I can't give you I'd have to look back I haven't looked at that in a long time Anakin I'm sorry but um I couldn't right off the top of my head I couldn't say whether that data is tracked specifically to substantiated HHB violations or not okay maybe and it sounds like we could request from the agency of education the substantiated claims at least however far back they go that that data goes we can we can get that data for you off of our power school system with cavya probably most reliable data within the last three years but beyond that can't make any promises on that and keep in mind that there are very very few suspensions and two two years ago right two school years ago and three school years ago right it might not be very representative data basically right it's from the last three years yeah I just have one last thing for HHB um I think the stat is great the metrics are great it's you know it's wonderful to have these numbers to look at um but more anecdotally I think another perspective that would be good would be maybe our student reps like americans act to survey the students and just say like you know how is it how's the vibe like just get a pulse on the general feeling of the schools in general of like is this making it is it is it we're seeing progress in the numbers in the metrics but it's actually making a difference in the schools yeah I think that's totally uh would would be really helpful um maybe I can follow up with you on that I think I'm in the minority I just want to caution the board against in the same vein that when you're getting all these emails it's now a task that has been assigned to I'm just concerned that we're asking for a lot of additional homework that would take your time away from working with students so I just want us to be really thoughtful and maybe things can get filtered through Libby and Jim as far as additional data or research um I I totally respect and understand that we needed to sort of help guide our policies but I worry that we're asking a lot of additional follow-up and feedback and questions and for data that may or may not be useful um and I don't want to be taking time away from the work you folks have to do that's all good point um other questions on just this presentation I think thank you well I get the opportunity to share a little bit about chronic absenteeism in our district and and first I just want to start by framing it and apologies if you've heard this from me over and over I like to frame what chronic absenteeism is so that we have the context and we talk about the numbers so chronic absenteeism is really including any time the young person is out of school so whether that's excused unexcused out of school suspension those are all days that are being missed right that's lost instructional time because young people are not in the building so when we talk about chronic absenteeism and what number of young people are chronically absent we're talking about how much they're out of the building um and and so the definition of chronic absenteeism is missing 10 percent or more days of the school year so in a full school year that'll be about 18 days of missed school that's the month of October as far as student days go so it's essentially like missing an entire month of school is to be chronically absent by the end of the school year um Libby if you can go to the next slide I wanted to include some of this information as well because it it really talks about a historical lens of being in school versus what we look at with chronic absenteeism so when you think about attendance uh speaking for myself growing up when I thought about attendance I thought about truancy and I thought about punitive measures and court and my mom will get in trouble and I will get in trouble um that is still very much written into law uh and truancy is still a practice that folks are used to and a lot of our families when I reach out they quick are quick to go there like what does this mean and what is this going to come to um the shift between really examining truancy versus chronic absenteeism is when you're looking at truancy you're only looking at unexcused absences primarily um so oftentimes that's reaching 20 days of missed school unexcused absences uh you're really putting an emphasis on compliance like you have to be here these are the rules this is the law um and again you're kind of lofting out there the legal system a lot of letters that are written in our district previously uh and in districts across the state and across the country will often reference state's attorney dcf it's the law when you get attendance letters so looking at chronic absenteeism is we're really trying to take a look at at when are young people in our building and when they're not we want to notice that so um we we're putting an emphasis on missed days and what it means to be present if you're not here you're not learning whatever the reason and i'm here to to support with the reasons um but ultimately you are not here and we want to notice that um we want to take a preventative lens which is why uh you all have seen the data even last year when we talk about chronic absenteeism we're watching it very closely because we can't just wait for 18 days to hit and then be like okay now we do something and that's kind of a truancy model too we're waiting for 10 days to hit 20 days to hit and now we do something we want to just keep watching we want to reach out to families we want to connect with families uh and learn about why young people are are not coming to school and how we can be providing different supports through that case management or even systemic changes that we may need to make so i just want to frame up kind of why we talk about chronic chronic absenteeism why i put such a focus on that and why we're not just looking at only unexcused absences any questions on on just the framework there yeah um liby if you go to the next slide uh so this is our our district right now so this was as of january 20th which was kind of the end of the semester for here at the high school so we kind of use that as a point to pull some of the data um this is our whole district 32 percent of the young people in our district are chronically absent so that essentially means 32 percent of young people one uh you know they're missing at least nine days of school at this point again this is excused unexcused but at this point in the year to be chronically absent is to miss nine days of school so 32 percent of students have missed at least nine days of school that's going to represent 374 students that's the size of our middle school that's the size of our elementary school right so that's how many young people are chronically absent it's the size of our an entire school in our district um i did isolate some of the data for young people who who qualify as for free and reduced lunch their chronic absenteeism rate is 41 percent students that have an iep their chronic absenteeism is 34 percent and our bi-pox students their chronic absenteeism is 32 percent which is right in line with what we see at the whole district the other piece that i included here was bi-grade and you'll see this nationally where there's kind of like this uh dip in the middle and so in kindergarten you see high rates of chronic absenteeism and senior year of high school you see high rates of chronic absenteeism Eric um so i want to just draw your attention to this because this is something as we look at trends in our district uh how is this lining up with what we see nationally this can kind of represent more of a mental model than some of the systemic issues that are coming in and other places right a young person entering kindergarten maybe it's the family's first time having a student in school still getting used to what that means to be in school every single day when they have an appointment when you have a family vacation you're still kind of adjusting at that point so we do tend to see more parents keeping students home when they're in kindergarten and then again as you you get to that 10th 11th grade absenteeism creeps up again so this kind of uh swoop as you see it is what we would expect to see in most schools across the country we go to the next slide Libby so here i just wanted to share kind of what our dashboards look like so this is data that when we update this as best we can weekly bi-weekly we're looking at what are the changes that we're noticing how many young people so we have a dashboard for every single school in our district where we're able to see for that specific school what are our chronic absenteeism rates so here at the high school we've got 149 young people that are chronically absent that's just over 37 percent of students here at the high school are chronically absent i will say the way that attendance is tracked at a high school level is a little different than what we do at the middle school or elementary school where at the the middle and elementary schools we've got daily attendance you come your your marks present and you're there at the high school we're really tracking bi-period so a student that may miss a certain block here or a certain block there we're able to notice that at a more granular level and so we are seeing a little bit more of a higher absenteeism rate partially because of the system of attendance that you use in a bi-period system so i do want to make a note of that so you will see some elevated numbers here but that's just because if you're in the building once it doesn't mean you're there for the full day we're able to track it so again here at the high school we're at 37 percent as we move on through the slides liby at main street middle school which is where you see that lower dip we're just over 27 percent of students who are chronically absent if we go down to uvs we're at looks like 32 percent of students are chronically absent and we look at roxbury we're looking at closer to 37 ish percent of students are chronically absent so i just kind of wanted to draw our attention to kind of what's happening in each school we do look at it and and slice the data in different ways young people who qualify as free and reduced lunch pieces like that christen i think from an attendance perspective to answer your question about we see this data about a population of students that okay now we have the data what do we do i will say from an attendance perspective it's critical that we're centering lived experience and how we go about with decision-making and informing and supporting families that's kind of the luxury of my position is that i'm able to spend more time with families and and learn with them and identify what are some of the things that are that are getting in the way how can we be more supportive so to me that's about centering lived experience and how we approach that data so we can learn from our families and students and and try our best to respond to those pieces um question i don't know if you have that specific data but i am curious what the chronic absenteeism will look like if purely sick days were removed yeah so uh i can say that we here at the high school it was about 50 50 abe so absent excused versus abu absent unexcused when we look at abe 90 95 percent of the time that's a student or family saying i'm sick uh got a stomach ache that's typically what an abe would be so if you look at just absent excused as sick you're going to see it's about 50 percent okay i mean that's definitely pretty significant then and i will add on to that and say many young people that i get to work with maybe coming up against some feelings of anxiety not feeling connected belonging maybe feeling overwhelmed that can manifest a lot of times there's a stomach ache right and you tell your family that like oh i'm sick a lot of times there's something more there that we want to be able to support with that isn't as straightforward as i tested positive for covid i am sick you know so when a lot of families are calling in and saying uh my student sick that will happen yes and if that's 20 days in the course of a couple of months i want to call them and be like i'm noticing this and how can i be supportive do you have what you need um because again sick or or not lost instructional time is happening right and so that's really where we want to dial in and just to follow up with that i mean how much of the absence unexcused are situations where a child just isn't showing up at school versus where their reason for not showing up at school might be known at school might have been brought to school but doesn't qualify as an excuse day it's like for instance you know a family may be taking a trip and pull their their child out early and i know that doesn't qualify as an excused absence but the kid doesn't have a choice the family's going to wherever um yeah yeah and they're not just you know it's not like they're you know saying but you know hi mom go to school and they don't yeah and i think it's a mix right and it's a lot of times a lot of pressure is put on our front office folks to pick up the phone and make a judgment call of like is this excuses it's not so we're really trying to tighten that up this this year and make take the guess work out as best we can we did a lot of training for the red stars in the summer to say here's what excuse is here's what unexcused is if you are in doubt default to excused because i'm not we are not necessarily here to say it's unexcused and that will be punitive we're here to notice absence overall so a lot of times yeah a family will take a vacation if you look at our absenteeism rates the week before winter break they're high look at the week after winter break they're high um that's a reality and i would encourage our students and families to really sit with that's missed time and when we can can we schedule these things in line with school breaks can we schedule doctor's appointments when we're able to be outside of school time um this lost instructional time there's a whole lot of evidence behind chronic absenteeism that's showing it has an academic impact if you're not here you're not learning it has a social emotional impact if you're not here you're not having that connectedness and belonging so there are lots of things to get in the way of young people coming to school some of it is family vacation some of it is anxiety some of it is families running on e and it's just really hard so all of those factors we have to really look at everything so from family vacations which on the surface are very much like i get it it happens and and that is historically been looked at really different than a young person whose family is running on e and is getting on excuse in the same way well that family was just on vacation they weren't and so we're trying to eliminate some of that bias some of that subjectiveness and and how we're looking at the data if that makes sense amazing i mean just thank you and i want to point out to anyone who doesn't already know all of the listeners all of our dozens of followers that this is a new position next position is new it was something that we were able to get through esser funding correct originally and now it's in the budget and we're going to be moving forward with this amazing work and i i don't know how many other school districts in vermont have a position like this but um but it's pretty remarkable the work that you're doing and um and thank you um i'm kind of curious kind of the same types of questions that jim and and merrick are asking is and you sort of touched on the lived experience and sort of more of the qualitative data that doesn't necessarily ping in numbers and graphs but um if you could give us a sense of like i mean 374 students would be your caseload but you know not all of those students you're concerned about and you know um are really working closely with could you give us an idea of roughly what your what your day to day sort of uh caseload of concern students student population is yeah you know i would we're concerned about all 374 yeah and um my intervention typically um so i do kind of the the front and tier one of like just noticing and and doing my best and some days are at another just uh i i don't like when families just get a cold letter uh and so i do try to call home and make a connection point first and then i'll say also a letter's coming uh and appreciate the context um i would say at the tier three level which is really where i'm i'm digging in and and doing that work that number can ebb and flow throughout the year based on student and families finding their their stability to 30 to 50 students i would say is your second school year is this right yeah second school yes okay okay and have you do you have any sense of like if this is were you able to get your feet under you that first year like do you get a sense of if this is sort of typical from comparison to last year yeah i i think so it's it's also really different um in the way that young people are experiencing school starting to build that connectedness back and also their immune systems are not there yet right and if you look at the elementary school attendance you can see when there are giant flare-ups of a virus being passed around and things like that so they're building immune systems back and so we're seeing increased absences in that way it is kind of running pretty parallel to what we saw last year um i will say we have some really uh incredible young people that last year their engagement was really really low like really low and when i see them in the hallways this year it's just incredible um i say that to say that for many young people it takes time right to build that muscle back up of coming into school again um and so it's running parallel and seeing the work of many of the SEL folks on our district and in our resiliency team and now with what jess is doing to be able to support a young person to come back into school with those kind of supports is um i think we're definitely seeing growth in ways that we didn't have last year so so i would send that out to those teams for sure of that's huge right i remember some kind of notification confirming an absence for my kids but i can't remember what it's called or how to access it are there ways for families to access some of the data that you have about what their own you know i can't remember who's sick when or you know other ways to access that interest there's a couple of ways one is uh i believe i'm like you can help me out with this but families can log into power school and be able to see the attendance data that way um and another would be a call from me say the high school power school interfaces a little tricky because of the semester so i haven't been able to like find where to go to see that number for my student who's in high school i appreciate hearing that and i think that that's maybe something that i could chip away at too of of making that like a bit more straightforward for families that just want to see that piece click here here here kind of thing yeah yeah i appreciate it and how would you coordinate in with you know some of the coaches and other people who run extra activities because just from my own experience i mean most of my kids lost time in high schools because they've got you know a track meet or a Nordic meet an hour and a half away that starts at three so you know the bus leaves at 12 30 or one you know and that's that's great it gets them there on time but it also you know they're missing two or three classes i talked to Nathan sometimes about his track meets but no i mean i think our registrars do a really great job so in power school when i'm looking at the data there's always a note if they have it and if it's saying something like Nordic ski or something like that like i'm able to see that other people are able to see that and get a good understanding having said that if that is piled on with x y z and we and you know like that's a factor and then we can look at the academic data and notice of academic data is showing a risk factor there we can dial in and there's a whole lot of value in being a part of extracurricular activities oh definitely you know and so that's a part of being in school and having that experience so it's really only going to come into play when that's piled on with other factors of you know jim took another vacation and so now they're out again and what are we going to do about this because it's a certain slip like and again we just try to notice and support and like start with that like how are you as opposed to you just getting a cold letter of you've missed this much time then you have to call and be like here's why there's this thing don't worry about it so that's a factor but not a big one christian thanks i want to echo emma to nick i just feel i feel personally really moved by your work and the approach that you're taking to your work and it feels like we have this really reimagined truancy officer role and i'm just really excited for your work to continue a quote that i hung on to from your section was um these economic barriers make coming to school every day a challenge that the education system is not always tailored to support which i know is so true and i think we uh families are oftentimes doing their best and yet there are just still these very significant uh gaps challenges traumas in their life um that really get in the way of getting kids to school um and yet the call of duty of schools are oftentimes already saturated right so i'm curious what like in your work if you're thinking about partnering with outside organizations or other partnerships to try to like attend to those you know those factors and variables and or in your conversations uh around lived experiences student with families like are we connecting families to resources and how's that going and just what that looks like in your work um we are doing a a lot of connecting local organizations who have been amazing from montpellier housing authority uh which has a long waitlist of families trying to secure more stable housing um to washington county mental health which is such a great partner um that's key aspect right so when we talk about just the foundational for looking at maslow that those basic needs right um the position that i'm in also allows flexibility for me to drive a family to a doctor's appointment who doesn't have a car um in ways that they would not have been able to get there potentially would not have gotten that prescription which helps that student in school which then we talk to the nurse and the nurse is talking to primary care and the nurse is able to say like cool we'll we'll take care of it we'll make sure they get there so i would say that's it that's a huge aspect is really plugging families into these external resources um and doing what we can to try to eliminate some of the barriers that would kind of build and build and build and just continue to be overwhelming um we're not able to eliminate those and i think there's work that we can be doing to support our students and families yeah other questions great thank you um living back to you all right so we've had lots well we've had a few families come to talk to the board about literacy um and so i wanted to give the board a little background just on what makes up um literacy instruction uh and the importance of each piece so this is coming this is not a new slide a new picture at all or a new metaphor um i believe it's been around since the 60s um and it's a nice indicator of what goes into literacy and learning how to read and just how complex learning how to read is um and so and we're going to get to literacy data too after this conversation but we front loaded it with this piece first then mic's going to take over um so when we're looking at what skills go into learning how to read or skilled reading this is one way to think about it as a rope and each of these pieces of rope have an importance um for some and and here's the kicker not all kids are the same right so kids aren't like a forward truck coming off an assembly line so some kids need the need a rope pulled on more than other kids um so i can give you some good examples as a teacher who's taught in many different uh places um so i was a second grade teacher primarily for 10 years around 10 years and i was in very rural Louisiana and i was in uh inner city brooklyn and i've been in very wealthy vienna austria teaching second graders how to read with with 13 different languages in my classroom and in each of those environments kids needed me to pull on different ropes parts of this rope so in some environments like in brooklyn there was limited vocabulary and background knowledge and so i pulled majorly on those two strings of this rope in order to get my second graders um who lived in um what is commonly known as the projects in brooklyn uh to be skilled readers we also did language structures we also looked at verbal reasonings with inference and metaphor we also looked at prince concepts and we also i also taught a whole lot of phonics and decoding and sight word recognition um but i had to pull a lot on vocabulary so i we did a lot of walking trips for instance to the south street seaport and said hey look at those boats do you see the windows those are those are called portals you know we did lots of different kinds of things in that way and it was all in literacy instruction um but i knew that group of students needed to have that vocabulary rope pulled on more and the background knowledge pulled on more uh in vienna austria they had background knowledge they had vocabulary in my class because it was so multilingual may have needed more of the language structures um in place and so we may have pulled more on that piece for that group of students and those are just groups of students then you have to look just like peggy sue was talking about as individualized readers some individualized readers need more phonics instruction some individual readers need more comprehension instructions because it appears that they can read any word they just not sure what that those words mean or how to string them in to understand the comprehension of this of the story so there's many pieces that go into teaching a child to become a skilled reader phonics is most definitely one of them and us and roxbury both focus on phonics um you can't ignore the other pieces of the rope however so phonics can't be the only thing that we focus on in reading we have to have all the pieces of rope and we need to get better and more efficient at noticing when a child needs us to pull a little stronger on one of those strings and that's the piece that we've been talking about so much with our mtss model that mike's going to talk about in a bit this same idea is this this model is from the 60s here this is one of the latest ways it says very similar things except it adds some pieces into um how skilled reading is is is created and i actually like this piece better so you'll see the same ideas from the reading rope um that's what that's called the reading rope in terms of word recognition and language comprehension it shows where those pieces of course interact in an event diagram but it also adds that green circle with the active self-regulation that includes motivation and engagement executive functioning skills and the a bit like there's a medic cognitive piece of strategy use knowing when to use which strategy um those through those pieces are absolutely essential in figure in learning how to become a skilled reader and there is no such thing in here that says in kindergarten these aren't important or in first grade um the idea of i don't know uh inference and and comprehending text through language is not important all of them are important um some students just need more of something than others i have friends what they're they're one child um seems to have come out of the womb reading but then and could read any word from the from one that he was like three four years old um but then he said what did you read and he'd say i don't know he had no clue so we have to pull more on that idea of comprehension and language comprehension with him his younger sister had had to really get targeted phonics instruction in order to read any kind of text um from first grade on second grade on their same same family um were read to in the same amount um but they're very different children and so as a system we need to look at be able to identify when a child needs a certain piece pulled on more than more than another um however having said that all of these things are important in becoming a skilled reader and we can't ignore one for the sake of another um so this is just a just a background information of what becomes a skilled reading teaching a child how to read is incredibly complex and putting up false binaries isn't helpful to to teaching kids how to read because it is a very complicated process and teachers will always need to be better and need to build their capacity at teaching kids how to read because it's so complex um and so mic's going to talk a little bit about what our plan is for that um and i just wanted the board to see just the amount of things that go into becoming a skilled reader and this starts from the first time a child sits on a parent's lap and has a book in front of them one of the board books or whatever it is that that you're reading with it with your child right so this all starts actually even before that it starts when the child comes out of the room and the parents start talking to them um in that language piece and depending on how they talk to them are they talking in full sentences or when they go when they go to when they look at a fish in a in an aquarium are they saying look at that fish do you see how his gills glitter and are moving in the water that's how the fish reads or breeds or are they saying yeah it's an orange fish that is a much different language piece um that will eventually if persistent influence how a child becomes a skilled reader and when a child becomes a skilled reader so there are so many complexities into a child becoming a skilled reader and yes we need to become absolute experts as teachers and how to do that and yes we have work to do in this area um and i just want to make sure everybody can see that there are so many different ways that a child needs to needs to there are so many different things a child needs to access in order to become a skilled reader so um i added this quote from linda darling hammond uh rather than being subject to the pendulum swings of polarized teaching policies that rest on simplistic ideas of best practice whole language versus phonics for example or inquiry learning versus direct instruction teachers need to know how and when to use a range of practices to accomplish their goals with different students in different contexts um and there's the the reference for that and there's also the board will get this this presentation um it will also be on our website under the board materials and if you click on the growing reference list that's a that's just a list list of references that i'm growing for the board and the community so that they have more information about just what what a child needs to become a skilled reader so that is their friend and some of them i know you need like an access to some sort of university to get so if anybody sees a title they want and they can access it just let me know and i can get it for you oh mike do you want to talk more about the the literacy data you don't have any slides on here do you know wasn't that clever i think what i can do is i can answer questions about the report but also talk a bit about our plan around literacy and what we're going to do i've met with several community members um and i think i can say with all sincerity this is the highest priority for us um we need to improve our reading instructions and we need to improve in social studies and we need to improve in math and we need to improve in science so this is just a part of our continuous process of improvement we have a pretty assertive plan going into the spring and into next year to support our educators and our students and our families in literacy instruction and learning one of the big things that's not as much of a wow factor for everybody but it's like my geek zone we are really going to end this year identifying our prioritize standards k through 12 in literacy which is our roadmap of who does what and we don't have that we don't have that established you know and liby and i've been here for five years three of those years were pretty spicy so in the two years that we've had to focus on this i'm pretty proud of where our committees have come and our educators have come and doing this work and by the end of this year we will have identified prioritize standards in literacy both in reading and writing which is no small feat and it's very exciting in terms of focus at each different grade level in k through four we really need to focus on those foundational skills that liby was talking about and supporting our educators with a pretty robust professional learning model around what are the foundational skills how do i identify the needs of students and how do i move with agility in my planning and instruction to do that and that's not one of those things that you want to do where you have a consultant come in two or three times during the year we want something very robust so we're working on some models that could potentially do that and provide that for our educators in a way that's also considered of their wellness and focus and really bite sized chunks of learning so that it is sustainable we've seen that in many districts where they go too fast too far and it's hard for people to keep up so we're we're trying to really find a balanced sustainable and impactful method of professional learning in five through 12 we're doing a lot of conversations around adolescent literacy both at the middle school in the high school and it's been fascinating we've reached out to school districts that are doing different models where you've come up with a professional learning plan that helps with content literacy so literacy across the contents for next year and really working with educators across all realms everybody's teaching reading and writing in a sense and how do we do that well it looks different for adolescent learners so how do we do that we we've dug way into that and then a continued emphasis on our remediation systems k through 12 we have done some amazing tier three work this year our tier three interventionists have been spectacular and working very very hard and we've learned a lot and we've we've found better ways to do things and we keep refining and we have this constant almost weekly system of looking at our practices and saying what's working what isn't how do we do this we're not waiting till the end of the year to look at everything and change it for next year we're doing it as we go and next year we you know we also have two open interventions positions at the middle school so we're hoping to build that capacity of our intervention staff even further to be able to address the remediation needs of students and like levy said some students need this and some students need that we want to make sure that we have staff members everywhere that can give this or that and make sure that they have that so we are doing a huge amount of planning right now between now and the end of the year to leave the end of the school year with everybody knowing what's happening next year and how we're going to do it and support them in that work um thank you that was super super helpful uh questions for liby and or mic joe i think this is a question for liby i saw um that you had testified i can't remember which committee at the state house about just mental health and the sort of additional layer and maybe strain isn't the right word but um that schools are really having to sort of become de facto mental health centers for our students and i'm sure our staff as well and i i can't help but think as i hear you know that it may not fit neatly into a box it's probably impacting all of the pieces that you folks work with i just didn't know if you wouldn't mind like sharing what you what you shared or what your recommendations are or what impact that's had um in mr ps um well it's it's certainly a different topic um but just briefly i was no you don't need to apologize i was asked to to testify on the mental health needs i believe i sent those links to the board uh link kota actually did a marvelous job in the beginning of that testimony who's a superintendent of franklin northeast um who really detailed the influence and and peggy su alluded to it earlier of their their just isn't the capacity with our mental health partners um they're overwhelmed they're understaffed they can't pay as well as some districts can pay um and so they're losing people left and right and they have incredibly complicated jobs with kids who have very um intensive needs and so they're it's hard to train people to be skilled in that area and it's hard to keep them once they're there because it's a high stress environment so our mental health capacity our mental health agencies need help and it needs to come from a statewide um place so so i i think that all all the information you know nick was was talking about the levels of anxiety and all of that kind of thing that influence could influence chronic absenteeism all of that if a kid is not in school or if a kid is not accessing learning it's going to influence pieces right um and so all of this has a major impact on on what we can do with kids because the bottom line we classroom teachers are not mental health experts you know principals are not mental experts um but we do know something about how kids learn um and so we want we want the state to help us help the mental health people and and not think oh schools just need another grant to access to increase their mental health capacity because that's not what we need we need our mental health partners to be um really robust and and be able to collaborate with us in the way that they want to but right now are being held back so yeah it certainly does influence it and and the board has seen that we when i started here i believe i said in my testimony we we had approximately a 750 000 dollar budget for mental health professionals it's now upwards to two two million if you look at um facilities upgrades because of spaces that needed to be you know if you add those pieces into it that's a significant increase in five years um and so we're building our own systems right now and everybody everybody else is as well we're not alone in that thank you other questions looks like Emma thanks Jim for the tech support um so one frustration that i've heard from caregivers is um is that their access to their own students um assessments is limited and i'm wondering um if you can speak to like is is SBAC uh star found to somehow are those assessments made available to caregivers and do they have to request first is it something that is given without requesting you just speak to that process of how the information is shared with caregivers mike do you want to do take that aspect we're given score reports for aspect the the information parents get from aspect comes from the state and they've changed that assessment now so it will i don't know how it will look but mike might be able to speak to that too yeah i don't know how to look either but um the the state's just rolling out the new cognizant assessment and has very limited information for a very short timeline um there's what they do say is that the results will be uh quicker after the assessment aspect sometimes you have to wait a whole year before you get your students results so hopefully it'll be before the end of the school year we don't know in what format that looks like or how it's done or anything yet um as far as renaissance star we do provide um summary reports for families that request them um we don't just send them home there's a lot of reasons for that renaissance star doesn't even recommend doing that um renaissance is a screener which is the 30 000 foot view of a student it is not a diagnostic tool um and it just is it's meant to be a screener in a benchmark system but we readily provide that for families that ask for it um f and p assessments are a little bit different those are something that we like families to really have a conversation with an educator about those results because it's not it's it's all edges speak um there's not a good summary for families on that so we do time those assessments for usually around uh report cards or parent conference time so that there can be those access to those conversations but anything a parent asks for they can see so is the is there another sort of um layer i mean so we're seeing these percentages are at or above benchmark and that's based on star assessments um is there another like classroom level assessment that's being done you know clearly there's the standards and there's sort of students are being graded on there on those standards um and those are available to caregivers um but i guess the feedback that i've been hearing is like sometimes a child has struggles uh in literacy or reading or whatever and then the caregiver's not like aware of it in time for them to feel that they're able to be responsive um in a timely manner yeah i i'm not sure how much so here's what i what i can say we have a different developmental assessments like at kindergarten there's there's a name assessment that's basically how many letters so they know in their own name um things like that that are all shared via the teachers i i'm wondering if a lot of that has to do more with the timing of assessments and parent conference conversations parent conferences report cards things like that that we need to do a better job of um one of the the big names in education gusky he talks about uh report cards he hates report cards um he basically says schools need to stop talking about report cards they need to start talking about reporting um that there needs to be more access to what's going on with my kid in the moment and how do we do that and how do we do those things we're trying to make that shift in many different ways um and i think that that question might speak to that a little bit more than access to to um an assessment um the we have pretty clear assessment guidelines and if students are um below at any point in those that's what we're using to identify students for tier three and as soon as a student is identified for tier three the parents are informed of the data and the goals and the progress monitoring and we've had a really good feedback on that consistently good feedback particularly in the k through four realm like i would just add on though that's a new practice yes it's yes it is it's that is a new focus for this year we heard that feedback and we we've we've changed the process because of that feedback yep now is everybody like so when we're seeing this report at union school in reading uh 68 percent are out or above benchmark are the rest who are not out or above benchmark are they tier three automatically or not necessarily not necessarily they they're maybe students in tier two which is uh additional enrichment support or reteaching in the classroom they may be you know they may i don't have the cutoff numbers but they may be one below or or something like that so it's not totally representative of that um but the students that are um significantly below are are in tier three they're receiving tier three supports i can say that um and we're progress monitoring those students and those parents are receiving regular communications in three week cycles so there's a lot of communication going on and uh and how long from the i mean i this is your first year you're like really having the system in place you may not know but how long from the beginning of the school year until a caregiver could expect to be notified if their student was tier three seven days so one week into the beginning of the school year yipper um i give the caveat of at us and at main street when main street will be high it will be better functioning with a fully staffed intervention team and possibly at roxbury i'm not sure it would be that fast at mhs no mhs is that's a good point mhs operates in a completely different system and we're we're dealing with different challenges have to do with what nick was talking about with the master schedule and credits and all sorts of different things can i ask a follow-up is how often do you give the star assessments three times a year fall winter and spring i have another question but it's not related so i want to give floor time to other people so right now in our district about one in four kids and in some cases more depending on grade level and things like that aren't where they should be as far as reading goes is is it realistic to set set an expectation of say a hundred percent of our kids can read at or above grade level by say third grade is that something that is a goal that we could set and feel like we can achieve it's a tricky question um third the third grade benchmark is really important to us that is uh one of our big heading goals and conversations i think what's tricky in this data is that so even when you look from fall to winter those aren't necessarily the same cohort we have kids move in kids move out and they come in with different reading levels and you know an example of something we learned this year is that we weren't paying enough attention to students that move into the district we were giving them a couple weeks to settle and didn't want to stress them out and a high percentage of those students had some needs they were there was a tendency where they were moving from school to school to school and missing some key foundational literacy skills and so we changed our practices this year and we screened those students as soon as they come in and it's been transformational for our efforts to support those students so i think that you know you you're not talking about a consistent set of kids that would be here for those three years every year and i don't i'm not offering that as an excuse but i think it's a just an element of context to have um it would be our goal that's what we would want to have happened that's what we would work towards i don't know that we would achieve a hundred percent the slides that liby showed with the rope and the venn diagram make sense to me and it is pretty eye-opening for me because as a non-educator myself it did not i don't did not understand the complexity of what it takes to teach a kid to read so i really appreciate that little mini what'd you call that ten minute master class every year in master class um because that is true that kids need a mix of phonics and comprehension and different kids need different things how are teachers able to know day to day whether or not what they're doing is working to reach every child in their classroom yeah that's what we need to work on that's that foundational professional learning that we need to do and we've had a lot of turnover in the last couple years so we have new teachers we have veteran teachers we have teachers that are transferred schools um so we need some continuity on our foundational literacy understandings and that's why we're putting this big push on something that's going to be very comprehensive and usable by the teachers not focused on a program but focused on those foundational knowledge skills that they need to be able to make decisions in the moment about what a student needs and do that well and fluidly so we're looking for kind of a next level model of how to do that and we're looking right now and we have constraints we have no substitutes you know so it's hard to pull a grade level team out for a day to do a training we have to think about it differently and how we're going to do that we also have to value the educators wellness in that process and not completely burn them out you know we want to make sure that this is sustainable and makes change in our classrooms for our kids and just to follow up on that I just wanted to get it but how good do you feel about the assessment tools you have to figure out because there's I mean there's two steps there's one that you know child x is a period to struggle to read and then there's so I mean and that can be kind of hard to identify yeah in and of itself in a class of you know 1718 you know depending on how much you know the teacher is noticing how much you know caregivers is speaking up and saying I'm noticing this at home um and then you know picking that out and then secondly like assessing kind of why the child is struggling to read do you feel that how do you feel about the adequacy of the tools we have to make that identification just one that there's a problem and two what what the root of the problem is because if you don't understand the problem it's hard to solve it yeah so I can't speak to Cognia yet um but that that'll be interesting to see what what information we get from that um Ren star I feel pretty good about um I know that there's kind of a mix of feelings out there but when you talk to any district about their screener that's kind of the response that you get um really the value in a screener is how you use it and I know that a lot of districts in Vermont use renaissance star and use it well the schools that we talked to about adolescent literacy that had really striking programs that were making an impact on students in five through twelve all used renaissance star so I feel I feel pretty confident in renaissance star as a good tool for us at a screener level below that at the diagnostic level we're getting much much better at looking at and kind of our mantra is we don't want to give an assessment that we're not going to use to do something um so we constantly review our local assessment plan and we're reviewing our local assessment plan this year so we're considering f and p there's a lot out there right now about f and p however when you dig deeper a lot of those schools had other issues going on with their implementation it doesn't really speak to f and p as much as it does their implementation um so we want to be considered of that our our teachers have expressed that they could get information out of f and p we want to understand what that means so we're looking at it we're saying is this a value it one of the things about f and p is it takes a long time to give so we have to we have to really think about what we're getting in return for the time that we're we're putting into it so we are doing that kind of evaluation um and then I think this year we've hired some staff that have brought some new tools to us in terms of even deeper diagnostics that really help us understand what students need around syllable structures word knowledge vocabulary access all these things in a really much more refined way and our tier three interventionists are sharing that and spreading that so we're starting to we just had our vertical team meeting on monday where all the interventionists from across the district are together and we give time for those folks to share those practices between each other and really start to spread the wealth um and I think we're doing a much better job of that so each year we'll review that and we'll go with what's going to give us the best information about learners regardless of you know what's popular or what we have or whatever it is but I feel pretty good that we're in the right direction on that and like I want to add on to the other place that we know our teachers need capacity building in is everyday formative assessment so one of the pieces you know local assessment plan is local assessment plan it comes around three times a year um it's to give you know these these checks programmatic checks and we certainly use it for individual kids but that's not enough to identify needs as fast as we need to identify them or want to identify them so that we can give kids the supports they need that needs to be coming from a a expert teacher expert informative assessment knowing exactly what they're looking for and how to ask about it um and that needs to come with regardless of what you're thinking of if you're thinking of the foundational skill that they're teaching or the comprehension skill that they're teaching whatever it is we need our teachers incredibly skilled to be able to do those very quick checks and take action on it that day or the next day and that's that's probably where our biggest need is right now um in building capacity for our teachers that sounds like an answer an answer to one of the question I was asking about how teachers know day to day whether or not they are what they're doing is reaching each kid and you're saying you don't have it yet yeah like I was having conversations with teachers just this year at a Roxbury to say do you need permit like I give you permission on Friday to be your assessment day you know like if you haven't if you haven't sat with a kid on what their focus is for a week sit with the kid on Friday just do it during your reading block time like I they're like we can do that I said yeah because you're teaching the next week is going to be so much better you know it's going to be so much targeted and individualized for what kids need by having very up-to-date assessment information and I think our teachers aren't there yet in their thinking um and and so you know we bring in this local assessment plan and school it's a mandate for schools right we we have to these three times a year um and I think sometimes teachers take that as and that's my assessment right which is not accurate reformative assessment it happens every single day um and how are we how are we writing that down how are we formalizing that so we have a track of what we've taught kids and what they need how are we acts or how are we taking action on it immediately instead of waiting for second for two tier two instruction those are some questions that we I think we have and um it will come it's it will come as we keep going but that's a major part of the capacity building and directly tied to our MTSS model that we're building and like Mike said that kind of work and that kind of level of skill and expertise does not happen because we bring one person in to talk about one of the reading skills like that just doesn't write it's a it takes time um and could because it's so complex I have other questions but we can go ahead right so this is a lot of data and the amount of data is growing pretty dramatically and we have families and community members that want more access to more data more transparency one could say with respect to their their kiddos we also have open interventionist positions that we can't fill would it be in the interest of the district to consider additional administrative positions to help dive into the data and provide it to our teachers and or families I mean are there people with those skills I'm thinking of Jill's comment and I'd rather see our educators educate in our interventionists intervene than spend a lot of time trying to communicate with families who deserve information but maybe that's a little bit beyond what we should be asking of of our educators I mean is that something that is worth considering I would say that's their job that's an educators job to communicate with families what's happening I don't like Michael say yes we need a data manager I know that that's what he's thinking right now and perhaps we will down the line as we continue to be more facile we just discovered that Nick Connor is a spreadsheet wizard which we're going to use now that we know is super secret and just go with that and teachers need to not only take quick data but act on quick data and report out on quick data like that's that's so assessment and reading assessment and and figuring out what to do next that is teaching that's not separate from teaching that is teaching so so I would say that's that's the work of a teacher and it may be a paradigm shift for some of our more veteran teachers I think I can speak to and I won't say what Libby thinks I'm going to say just to give some context some geeky context on what it takes for us to put this together right now it's it's essentially by hand right now so it it does take a significant amount of work and time away from actually doing the work to address the data and so I appreciate that question but just so everybody knows right now this is Nick and I drawing up spreadsheets with the lookup codes and doing a lot of things that that aren't designed to give us this data right now and but we have plans that are shifting towards a more sustainable and more automatic structure and system that I think is going to be transformational so right now one of the analogies I used with the interventionist recently is was we need to stop patching up the boat that we're in right now because the new boat's almost here and we just need to get to that new boat so we have a program called panorama that if and when the the budget passes we will be transitioning to that has an MTSS dashboard that houses absenteeism IEP intervention plans and progress monitoring and social emotional data all in one space now every vendor tells you that any their product will do everything that you want so I'm not saying that but it's going to be a heck of a lot better than the two of us geeking out for three hours doing Google data studio so I think we're moving there I think we're moving to a place where we're going to have more robust capacity with this data and it won't be as difficult for us to put together a report like this for you all because we're going to have systems that that make sense so we're almost there so just like all of you I just really want to thank Mike I think you know not everybody knows that when you were hired on basically within a year or so you had to like completely pivot and be very flexible and I think you more than almost anyone in the district maybe you and Libby have had to wear like a million different hats you were the principal assistant principal of interim principal for the middle school for a while yeah I mean so it's it's incredible how much you've been pulled away from your job and it's a real relief to have you here tonight presenting on what your actual role is meant in and intended to be and so I'm looking forward to the type of progress that you're going to be able to make now that you're in your specified role so it's really appreciated that you've been able to be so flexible through COVID and all of that and and then I'm really excited about you being able to do the work that you were hired to do I'm wondering about the ESPAC data why is it still embargoed when what what are we able to see now from that data it's still embargoed it's still embargoed because the state is waiting to give us our snapshot which I presented last year and is is not really usable so it's it's embargoed because of that that's all I know I can tell you or am I you will you will probably know at the exact same time we know because there will be a press release and a press conference that we weren't aware of you probably know before we did yeah yeah I don't understand either and the fact that there's sunsetting the assessment and holding on to those results is even more confusing I don't know we've asked a lot and then back to Kristen's question about sort of now that you have the data and you're able to like see who is sort of disproportionately impacted and this and that I know that I mean we don't necessarily have that information in the presentation but we know that free and reduced lunch kids tend to underperform with meeting standards and assessments like this and I'm wondering like what if there's like a district-wide plan to or maybe just a grade level plan to sort of approach that disparity yeah there's a lot in that question so one free and reduced designation right now is really spongy it is it is not clear nick is a part of a state level conversation about a different measurement than free and reduced lunch because it's impacting states and funding and the superintendents are talking about this as well so frl in itself is really funny and I heard a great quote from a speaker the other day who was a free and reduced lunch student and he said frl tells you more about how I eat than how I learn so we need to think about that data differently I really appreciated that point of view having said that I think all of us are in our own initiatives are working to help with those students so there's a lot of crossover between my work and nick's work for example so when the interventionists are working with a student that's going through homelessness or I know that nick is transporting there's this connection point about the work that nick's doing and what the interventionists are doing we had some students transition into the school that nick was a part of that transition and the interventionists went out of their way to welcome that student and like go an extra mile to make sure that that transition went well so I think there are a lot of immeasurable things that we're doing right now that maybe we weren't doing as well or as consistently as we should have been in the past but now that we're all looking at all these different factors there's a lot of crossover supports in that area I think what the interventionists are looking for are trends in terms of skills so one of the things so a student in a tier three intervention may have three different skill-based goals and we're tracking all of that and that skill is progress monitored three times during the cycle and so what we're starting to see are there students coming from particular demographics or particular grade levels or whatnot with the same lagging skills so that we can see is that a tier one instructional concern are they not getting it in the classroom is this something from the prior year are these kids that we're moving in which is something that we we took away this year so I think that we're much more cognizant of all of those factors and putting it into immediate action and trial so one of the things when we discovered that the new students weren't we weren't paying enough attention to them we did a pilot for two weeks and as it turned out like the next day we had five students move in it's really great let's seize this opportunity let's let's let's try screening these students and see what we see and then by the because we meet weekly we're able to have these conversations on a very regular basis about what we saw we saw that those students all needed significant literacy and support between UES and Main Street so we were able to put things in place much quicker and then we we talked about that and what did we see and what was the consistent lagging skill so I think that what what I want to convey is that we have a practice in place that is allowing us to consistently consider those things and react to them quickly and test them out and then react again where I don't think we had that before Charlie Carver's Joy we are at 840 we did a few items on the agenda and are also factors in the Peggy Sue Nick and Mike and Libby are are being kept from other other parts of their lives so so definitely a few more questions but let's try not to go over the wee hours Kristen one last burning question um so it sounds like there is a lot of like thoughtful thinking and analyzing and planning happening behind the scenes I mean it would be great for you guys to wear like headcams every day so we could actually see I mean it's just so much and I'm yeah okay okay um and and they're still kind of loose ends and things are still coming together and it sounds like these things have already been underway and they're also and they're also probably responsive to some of what we're hearing um so I'm wondering if there will be a time that all of this can get into one place in a digestible format for our families and community members to know and see and feel rest assured that there is very concrete uh you know actionable things happening in the district whether that's the the podcast or you know the podcast for example where it's just at that kind of format that feels really digestible for folks so you know I feel like this happens a fair amount where we get feedback from the community and then we get the reveal at these meetings that all these great things happening so I'm just wondering how you all have a plan to kind of roll this out for the community Kristen that's the whole purpose of the four pillars blog yeah our principles our principles publish um monthly or biopetally a little fuzzy I woke up at three thirty this morning some of the fuzziest whether it's it's two weeks or by month but each one of those publish each one of those um blog posts will be about one of our four pillars in the work that's happening in that school um and so so that's one of our efforts to do that now whether that is getting to the people who need to hear it or it's the right you know I was in a communication seminar today and whether that's the right strategy or not that was our attempt to make our work here more public because it I feel like I've said the word complicated and complex 10 000 times tonight but it is truly like building this system it is truly very complicated work and it's a lot of edgy speak as Mike said earlier um and so that's one of our ways for doing that um and I think our principles have done a really nice job at writing those up and so if that's one of the strategies that we've used this year I would agree and I read them every day so it's not Jason smiling right now it's not work done in vain for me and I understand the conversation of the last board meeting is you know trying to not put things on you again but what is on us as board members to kind of be in the megaphone to get that information out there but I was specifically speaking to this literary piece because it is it's it's become it's been bubbling up right so just and there's incredible work happening so just how that gets to one place in a digestible format for folks there's a couple things that we're doing so one thing that you have to know is that when we come talk to you in generalities we have to talk to our educators before we go here's the plan to the public right and talking to our educators they have very limited time so for example in this next month I'm going to be meeting with each grade level at each school to go through this plan garner feedback from our educators get some good ideas on what they're thinking and seeing and that's going to take it's going to take me a month to do that um but it's the right thing to do right and then um the other thing that we're working on is a I feel like and Libby will laugh as a former curriculum director I feel like my whole life has been built on creating a parent curriculum site and I never quite get there it's a very difficult thing to make time to do but we are planning to have a parent curriculum site that will have access to the priority standards the proficiency scales all those things by the end of the year as we do those knowing that curriculum is always in draft form so it's always changing it's always in the process and some things will be there and some things won't but we'll hopefully have that up by by June at the latest but sooner than that hopefully with all that information as well and that will not be I've had conversations with three different parents in the last week wondering specifically like what should my kid know by the end of the year so I think that will be greatly appreciated yep thank you it's always on my to-do list yeah I think I think it's worth noting that a public public public schools and a public school of the size is one of the few institutions that does this much interface with the public that does not have a communications director because people consume information at so many different levels I mean it's really like a full-time job to translate this and put it out there for people to digest them though so and I do have to say Jen that Anna does a marvelous job I mean but but that's not but that's not her job it's it's like 25 percent of her job yeah yeah no I mean the the amount of communication she's doing is fantastic but not having one person to centralize and be like well we can get this block here but here's how we get it here and then that's that's tough yeah yeah well I just had a follow-up for that because I agree with Kristen that there is an awful lot that of good happening behind the scenes and a lot of it I can also understand the frustration of parents who are who might be listening and hearing okay I'm hearing Mike say that this is going to be a place next year but I have a kid who's having a hard time reading right now and one of the main themes that is arising from the public comment that we've been hearing for me anyway is that these parents really want to be in partnership with their students teachers and with their with this district in in in getting their kids to succeed and one of the themes that we've heard from Libby and Mike and all of these educators here tonight and in other board meetings is that they also really want kids to succeed and so I'm wondering about what is that and it's okay if you don't have an answer right now but what's that missing piece that is hindering that collaboration is it more information is it asking the right questions is it not knowing you know I don't have the answer and I but I feel like that's a pretty big missing piece for us right now for to to support the collaboration between parents and their kids educators I think that's a really good question for our principals Mia it might be something that's worthwhile for the principals to come present on the board so for instance this year Julie and Katie so msms and us respectfully or respectively both read through every report card that went home every comment everything that's never happened before our educators were a bit taken aback by it and and some report cards were sent back to teachers to say no you need to make a more specific comment about this kiddo and what's happening and so it's it's lifting that standard that expectation a little bit so that's just like one piece of evidence of like I'd love to hear it's a good question I think for our principals who are closest to the relationship between teacher and parent any further questions well I want to thank all of you for putting this together this is a a ton of data it's super helpful it really helps us get a fuller picture and I think it's also raised some some you know deeper dives obviously like one of our goals as always is to make sure that we're improving our understanding of how our kids are being educated and what's working and what's not and where we need to make investments where we need to build on successes that are that are already happening and you know we we can't make that assessment without these types of presentations so I know it's a lot of work but it's time very well spent and it really helps us know it helps us communicate with the community it helps the community now so thank you thank you very very much I think we can go through the rest relatively quickly we don't have five policies so we have a policy monitoring report for d15 which is our HIPAA compliance to have a motion to approve d15 hopefully we do not need 10 minutes on this but any discussion on the HIPAA compliance policy all those in favor and the second reading of the d22 library materials there was some edits made in relation to the feedback that was given last meeting any comments or discussion about that that can be incorporated by the policy committee before a third reading my plan will be to after tonight at our next meeting will be to accept the changes that as you see them in this document so if there is a change that you don't like or you have questions about I think that's where we should focus our time but I'm not going to go through tonight in the interest of time and make all those changes in that time to do that in the policy committee and this is something you can between now the next meeting you could also forward a comment to Emma or the policy committee and that can be made and for viewing and you know as we just witnessed with the other policies you can have as many readings as we need we can have six every time I will email you the only thing I saw is in the cross-reference policies section they seem to reference policies that are vSBA model policy like the numbers of the vSBA and not ours like c29 is the district equity policy whereas ours is f22 unless they're supposed to be referencing the vSBA yeah this is actually something that Anna and I are going to work on just renumbering our policies to match the vSBA policies but I will make note of that thank you I've been writing Emma but just to say out loud for the sake of being in a public meeting one thing that's set out to me is there's language that's like building diverse and inclusive collections is a core value and I might just be like an obnoxious wordsmith or here but I don't think that the building of the collections is the core value but it's one of the ways we live our core values of equity and inclusion so I would just offer that as a suggested edit but like I said I can email you that language if that is helpful can you just bring my attempt I to the exact paragraph sorry I can in just a sec there we go thank you thank you yep okay and then I still have a question of how we know if we are accomplishing what we intend to do with this policy maybe that lives in procedure but it does also kind of feel useful to name it in the policy just things that will tell us what are the indicators of success I guess would be the way to think about it yeah we did reach out to Sue with that question okay and she did respond and then I just haven't okay been able to circle back with her yeah so I'm hoping that she has some helpful guidance for us on that great thank you I'm excited to have this policy on the books yeah absolutely no thanks again to the librarians for bringing it to us and yeah advocated for um other questions about d22 okay now uh we go to executive session which I think can be relatively quick um we're going to say for two sessions one is contract negotiations um and the second is personnel evaluation uh can you have first we need a a motion to on the finding uh regarding contract negotiations and Anna has very helpfully put that in here and my feeling Libby is why don't you come in to executive session for the first part and then we can let you go for the second all right um I got this yeah I moved to find that premature general public knowledge regarding contract negotiations would clearly place the board at a substantial disadvantage if discussed in public second discussion all is in favor aye any opposed um the second motion I move to enter executive session for the purpose of discussing contract negotiations and also the second part uh with personnel in person excellent um I'll second that I was in favor all right great um before we get up can I just say this is Anakin's last meeting oh is it right and uh oh where's the cake oh the cake's in the executive session just kidding anyway I just want to reach out thank thank Anakin for his three years of service to the board and it's you've been a great colleague to work with yes thank you for noticing I thought we I had in my mind we had a you thought we had one more so we had one more um but we don't um yeah I know thank you Anakin uh now we will we will miss your very thoughtful voice uh and efficacy on the board and we also miss your uh wizardry at numbers and um negotiations and financial schools as well so thank you oh miss you're carpooling out to Roxbury thank you you're a good carpool buddy I enjoyed working with all of you and I learned a lot from each of you